Time for a little break from physics and fiction! Though I haven’t been very active recently, for many years I was a hardcore gamer, playing both role-playing game and board games. In fact, I credit much of my early aptitude in mathematics to the amount of time I spent crunching numbers in Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m hoping to get back into some more gaming at my local game store, but I’m also planning to get back into painting fantasy miniatures. For those unfamiliar, role-playing games and fantasy wargames can be played on tabletop with 25mm miniatures, and there is a vast collection of high-quality unpainted minis available for purchase. Though I haven’t played games for quite some time, I’ve been painting on and off in the interim.

I thought I would share some images of my best paint jobs, with a little bit of a description to go with each one! I should note that, being my best work, for every miniature you see here there are at least two more that didn’t turn out quite so well. I should also note that these miniatures were painted for display, as opposed to being painted for gaming. This means that I spent much more time on each paint job and used light coats to allow for finer detail. Paint jobs for actual gaming are necessarily cruder and use thicker coats.

Nice work. I attribute my own maths ability to learning to code aged 11. But then maybe it’s just a feature of me to like all mathsy things. Hard to be sure about cause and effect. Unless you have a twin and parents prepared to experiment.

Nice! Yeah, coding helped me with my math skills as well, considering I started learning to program with “basic programming” on the Atari 2600!

I couldn’t remember exactly where I got that trio of orcs, but you’re right that they are Heroquest Orcs. The Heroquest booth at GenCon some 15 years ago had a dice game promotion where you roll the dice and get the minis you roll.

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The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.